Amazon’s robots and workers rule the business habitat, deciding what can be bought and sold, what products are genuine or fake, and what prices can be charged.
In the past year, there have been many articles about how Amazon treats its warehouse workers and other employees and its attempts to prevent them from joining the union. But the abuse of Amazon's workforce is far from the only negative impact of the once prosperous mom-and-pop stores being swallowed up or at the mercy of unknown e-commerce behemoths. The rise of Amazon means that more and more Americans are losing their business autonomy, dominance and the right to introduce innovation into the terms of their own transactions and business relationships, and ultimately their ability to control their own finances and personal destiny .
At least some of Amazon's most offensive practices and policies have become the focus of recent investigations by Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, and local officials. The subjects of these investigations include Amazon’s disturbing practice of forcing its top third-party sellers to disclose their shipping and manufacturing contact details, using these contact details for themselves, and then competing with or simply imitating the best-selling products of third-party sellers, as well as searching The results lead to Amazon's own listing. As described by Harvard Business School professor Zhu Feng, Amazon essentially "operates the platform as a laboratory, allowing people to innovate and compete with each other, and then pick the best products for themselves [s] f] and capture [s] value." Other suspicious Amazon practices under investigation include its control of product pricing, a bot that specifically monitors listing prices to ensure they fall within a certain price range, and downgrading the list of sellers who offer other products at lower prices. They maintain similar lists of websites. Perhaps even more disturbing is that Amazon suspended the seller’s account under the pretext of untrue products, seized the inventory of the product, and then-notably-sold it on its own or through another company (such as its wholly-owned subsidiary Woot) These products. .
But Amazon is responsible for another set of problematic practices. Although regulators have noticed these practices, they are more difficult to put directly in the regulatory crosshairs. Such practices may not all rise to the level of anti-competitive or outright illegal behavior, but they will certainly make the lives of many third-party sellers on Amazon a hell. In the most layman's terms, Amazon treats sellers like rubbish. It imposes on them the kind of absolute hegemony exercised by totalitarian regimes of the 20th century over their hapless subjects - acting with the immediacy and technological influence that such regimes envied - and avoiding seemingly random, self-contradictory or Bland and absurd statutes. It uses the metaphorical waving of an automated hand to throw sellers’ financial lives into chaos, forcing them to admit wrongdoing, ignoring reasonable protests and desperate requests for leniency, and showing arrogant disregard for their fate.
The case of the seller Mikhail Fenko is a typical example. On June 23, 2021, Mr. Fenko suddenly received an email from Amazon’s seller performance department, informing him that “seller’s account has been deactivated” and “listing has been deleted.” His account and outstanding sales Outgoing funds will be frozen. The basic explanation provided by Amazon is that these measures were taken "due to multiple intellectual property rights [sic] and non-infringement."
Since 2015, Mr. Fenko, an industrious immigrant and entrepreneur from the Republic of Belarus, the former Soviet Union, has managed an Amazon account under the brand name "Strong Faith" to sell various religious artifacts imported from places such as the Holy Land of the Bible. Nazareth and Bethlehem. Over the years, he has built a small but successful company that would be a well-respected but somewhat eccentric corner store in a small town in the early days. Now, in the Amazon era, Fenko's business is operated through a single platform of the e-commerce giant.
Working through Amazon is a Faustian bargaining. On the one hand, the platform can cover households all over the world, which makes it possible for successful corner stores to achieve far higher incomes than in the past. But, on the other hand, for the same reason, although each small town has its own corner store space, perhaps even more than one, the industry consolidation promoted by Amazon has forced companies in small American towns to enter the same platform and allow them to Competing for market share in zero-sum, cruel battles with similar merchants, not only in the next town, but also in the next state, and even on the other side of the world, including those countries that may not conform to business ethics, meet our standards.
As a June 2021 fact sheet from the local Institute of Self-reliance suggests, Amazon’s market dominance-the company currently accounts for more than 40% of U.S. e-commerce sales-is undoubtedly disastrous for small businesses "With the development of Amazon, the number of independent businesses has declined. Between 2007 and 2017, the number of small retailers (with less than 500 employees) fell by 65,000. Approximately 40% of the country’s small clothing, toys, and Sports goods manufacturers and about one-third of small book publishers disappeared.” It is difficult to consider a 40% decline in just ten years as commercial genocide. Even if it swallows independent suppliers and leaves them no choice but to sell through its platform, Amazon has tightened the screws and increased its own sales commission from 19% in 2014 to 30% in 2019. Feeling this pressure, only 11% of Amazon sellers said that their business on Amazon has been successful; the vast majority of third-party sellers who choose to sell goods through the Amazon platform have died and been buried within a few years.
Like any business that has operated long enough in a customer service-oriented industry, Fenko has received overwhelmingly positive customer reviews, but he has learned to deal with his opportunism, dishonesty, and difficulty calmly and calmly. The situation of the clients you get along with. Like any merchant operating long enough in Amazon's competitive e-commerce environment, Fenko is also forced to take offensive and defensive measures against unscrupulous sellers in order to gain an advantage — whether it is selling counterfeit goods or accusing him of the same. In these interactions In the process, he also had to struggle with Amazon.
Amazon’s lengthy and unilateral seller agreement includes provisions that allow Amazon to suspend the account for any reason, allow Amazon to suspend the account for "convenience of 30 days’ notice," and immediately suspend or terminate any material that violates the account within 7 days (or more In a short time, if Amazon believes that the violation may make Amazon itself liable), it will be corrected. It allows Amazon to suspend accounts for any purpose that the company believes is deceptive, fraudulent or illegal, as well as the use of accounts that Amazon determines may harm other sellers, customers, or Amazon. But there is no explanation in Fenko's account suspension notice, and there is no 7-day-or for that matter, any-healing period. Although the seller agreement promises that Amazon "will immediately notify you of any such termination or suspension via email or similar means (including Seller Central), explaining the reason and any appeal options," in fact, Amazon often issues suspension or termination notices that are so vague. The sellers hardly know what prompted this move. In addition, no one on Amazon can chat or call the seller to clarify any ambiguities and resolve the issue quickly. Amazon provides very little phone support for sellers. In this case, the Amazon staff at the other end cannot access specific seller information, so all they can do is to reiterate the general Amazon policy statement. They were unable to discuss or clarify the specific situation of the seller. As a result, the seller is caught in a high-risk guessing game—or, more precisely, a game that is high risk for sellers but low risk for Amazon, and there is no mechanism to help even These odds.
The actual consideration of Amazon's decision to suspend the account will actually lead to mischief by other sellers and customers. For example, sellers—whether acting in their own name or through someone else's identity—sometimes submit suspicious or outright false reports about their competitors’ intellectual property infringements. Amazon usually accepts such complaints and deletes the allegedly infringing products, and will take measures to suspend and terminate the account when dealing with products that it determines as continuous infringements. (In contrast, when its algorithm blows the fuse, Amazon may begin to continuously reject notifications of legal infringement from specific copyright holders without explanation.) Another example: One of the main reasons an account may be cancelled is repeated negative customer feedback Point to product quality violations. The relatively small number of such complaints in a row is usually enough to arouse Amazon's anger. After being aware of this vulnerability, sellers who are willing to take malicious measures to gain a competitive advantage will create fake orders just to leave a positive review for themselves and negative feedback for others. Some people even pay for "feedback services" to provide them with positive reviews or to advertise to their competitors at an appropriate price. This is a special problem for Chinese Amazon sellers. Amazon realizes where its corporate bread is, and operates with the customer's almost always correct mentality, and it is almost impossible for sellers to refute this "negative feedback." Other sellers realize that Amazon is trying to crack down on people who buy fake reviews. In fact, they will even pay for the fake review service to purchase obviously false positive reviews for their competitors, thus causing these competitors to be suspended. However, even if such false review factories are not included, actual Amazon customers have the same incentive to damage the seller’s reputation by claiming that they want to return the product without paying the return shipping fee. The product delivery is damaged or does not match the seller’s description.
Another type of violation that triggered the recent wave of account suspension involves "related accounts", that is, sellers identified by Amazon to secretly operate multiple accounts under different names. (Amazon's "Seller Code of Conduct" does not allow sellers to "operate multiple sales accounts on Amazon without legal business needs.") Amazon's blind algorithm may draw account-related conclusions for a variety of reasons- Family members share a computer or physical address, friends who use Amazon to send gifts to each other’s addresses, sellers who happen to live in the same hotel, etc. As the tragic experience of a cherry seller in Washington State proved, Amazon can mistakenly conclude that one seller is related to another seller based on the mislabeling of the relationship by bad actors, and then force the seller to spend months. Deal with Amazon's automated machine to try to restore the seller's account.
The end result of Amazon’s policy is that instead of spending time on improving existing products, developing new products, or otherwise elevating the business to a new level, sellers—especially those who cannot afford the luxury of employees who specialize in handling such issues Small sellers with fees-may waste days, weeks, or months to defend against various dastardly attacks by competitors trying to gain an advantage by gambling with Amazon's algorithms. For a long time, Amazon itself has hardly provided any support, because sellers are entangled with criminals and Amazon and others.
A complete industry of lawyers and consultants has emerged, charging sellers ranging from $500 to $5,000 to guide them through the troublesome process Amazon wants sellers to follow in an attempt to restore the accounts that many sellers depend on. One of the suggestions given by such guidelines is not to ask why Amazon actually suspended, as explained by a popular lawyer website that deals with Amazon: “Your next step [at the time of suspension] is to prepare for Amazon’s suspension. Appeal, but please put it aside and take some time to think about it. Do not send a message to Amazon for clarification. Any such message is considered an appeal[,] and they will not tell you why." Their general advice to sellers -Regardless of whether the seller is wrong, or whether they are clearly wronged by Amazon-is to confess, confess, self-condemn to Amazon, and declare how they will work tirelessly in the future to avoid repeating their real or perceived misconduct:
If Amazon or any other online selling site suspends your seller account and allows you to appeal, they don’t want to hear excuses or arguments about the validity of the suspension. They want you to identify and acknowledge violations of their policies, determine what caused the suspension, and propose a clear and specific action plan to prevent future violations of the policy.
Amazon’s most typical response to an appeal — the response time may be weeks or even months — is to issue a general rejection that is less informative than the initial notice of termination or suspension: "We have received your submission, but there is not enough information. To reactivate your account. Since you were unable to provide enough necessary information in the appeal you submitted, we have decided that you may no longer sell goods on Amazon.com." The seller can try to make further appeals, hoping that it will be correct at some point. A note of regret in the octave. At the same time, time is passing, which means that sellers not only lose more income every day, but also face increasing costs of bearing product storage fees and employee salaries. The processing may pass the "sale deadline, and respond to violations Or potentially huge trouble caused by fulfilling the existing contract with the supplier.
If the appeal to Amazon fails, sellers will not have many attractive options. Amazon’s seller agreement contains another onerous clause that requires a binding arbitration at Amazon’s home in Washington State to resolve disputes. These private, one-off, home-town arbitration procedures-free from public scrutiny, there is almost no precedent value that may attract a large number of similar litigants and force Amazon to change its policies-according to anecdotal reports, lawyers who specialize in all of Amazon's affairs , Often unsuccessful. The reason is simple: First, Amazon is not obliged to allow any particular seller to use its platform. Therefore, unless the seller can point out that Amazon has seriously violated its agreement — and Amazon can modify this unilateral agreement on its own to make it more unilateral — the seller is likely to be out of luck and, soon, goes bankrupt. As explained in the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s 2020 report on Amazon’s anti-competitive conduct, compulsory arbitration remedies are rarely invoked by sellers, and for good reasons: “Because sellers are generally aware that this process is unfair. It’s too likely to produce meaningful remedies, and they have little motivation to take action."
After Fenko received the account suspension notice on June 23, the initial action was to go through Amazon's appeal process. Fenko is committed to researching the wisdom of first-person accounts and online Amazon seller support forums, which spread a large number of horror stories. Fenko put his righteous indignation aside and adopted the tone of Amazon demanding the necessary submission and confession. suject. But he still has a bigger problem with no obvious solution: Although he is prepared to confess the crimes he did not commit, he does not know which crimes Amazon wants him to confess.
Fenko knows that other sellers and non-seller third parties have accused him of infringement of intellectual property through Amazon's internal mechanisms in the past, but as far as he knows, all these infringements have been resolved. They are involved in simple and trivial matters such as trademark infringement claims, where the "trademark" is not even a registered trademark in any form, and copyright infringement claims against universal heart-shaped paperweights. The claimant is a competing seller for similar products. Provide different Amazon listings as proof of copyright. This and other so-called violations of this kind are nothing more than annoying claims, and it is Amazon’s policy that unfortunately encourages such bad seller behavior. However, it is clear that Amazon's blind algorithm is triggered by the accumulation of such unfounded claims. And those are just infringements of intellectual property rights. As for the "non-infringement" mentioned in the mysterious account suspension email on June 23, 2021, Fenko has no idea what Amazon's robot army might think of.
Fink did what he could. He collected all relevant information about his past "improper conduct"-invoices, personal lists, communications with Amazon and third-party wrongdoers regarding these previous allegations, as well as infringement notices and notifications sent under the Tort Liability Act. Counter-notice the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Following the various appeal guides he had read, he developed a detailed action plan outlining the steps he would take to prevent the recurrence of such early events. On July 19, he submitted this carefully assembled material outline to Amazon, hoping everything goes well.
One week passed without any response. At this moment, he accidentally heard from an old friend of his that the latter's Amazon seller account had recently been deactivated at the same time as Fenko's account. The stated reason for the suspension is a violation of Amazon's "Related Accounts" policy. Fenko's friend's account has been inactive since 2017; the official suspension does not matter to him. But this made Fenko think: Is this a "non-infringement violation" that Amazon is concerned about? Will something about the countless personal intersections and interconnections between Fenko and his friends catch Amazon's attention and cause the two accounts to be incorrectly marked as "related" in the Amazon world? Mr. Fenko spared no effort to read how to resolve this situation and submitted further evidence to Amazon-including company tax identification documents, utility bills, credit card statements, and even a copy of his passport-to prove the two The account is not linked and promises Amazon that he will be careful to avoid improper behavior in the future.
When Qi Fa did not respond for the second time, Fenko bit his head and hired a well-known law firm specializing in the suspension and recovery of Amazon accounts to help him solve this problem. The lawyer filed multiple appeals on his behalf, listing all the information they thought was relevant. On August 24, 2021, they filed an appeal, resolved all possible problems, summarized every incident, whether open or closed, sorted out the evidence, assumed responsibility, and provided various remedies.
Finally, on August 31, 2021, more than two months after Fenko's seller account was suspended for the first time, his entire business was in trouble. Amazon believes that this situation is worth responding to. Amazon did not indicate in any way which of his many appeals its August 31 email responded to. Instead, it issued a succinct rejection notice, more puzzling than the initial suspension. "Your Amazon sales account is still inactive," it wrote. "Your listing has been deleted. The funds will not be transferred to you and may be kept for 90 days or more." Then, this email poses a question to sellers who may be curious: "Why is this?" It only This answer was provided: “This decision was made after reviewing your account and the information provided.” To make matters worse, the communiqué stated “We may not reply to further emails regarding his question. Sincerely, Amazon ."
Fink's heart sank. What should he do now? He posed this question to his lawyer. They tried another appeal, which was filed on September 8. After a while, they didn't receive a reply from Amazon, and then they were on par with Fenko: it didn't look good. They have no more suggestions to offer. Even the experts are stumped.
Months passed. Amazon did not take further action on Fenko's appeal, nor did it respond to any letters from him on this issue. Instead, day after day, hundreds of Amazon boxes appeared in his home. The inventory of "Fulfilled by Amazon" products he has stored in Amazon's warehouse is being returned to him. The freight has been credited to his account. Every day he sorts out thousands of perfect items that can no longer be sold, and he must now put these items in a paid warehouse, hoping that one day he can sell them again.
Fink didn't know what to do. He is willing to admit anything, including things he hasn’t done—infringing intellectual property rights, maintaining related accounts, being a general villain, and even the assassination of Kennedy—if it means he can restore his business and support his family, including Served as nursing students and children of special forces soldiers in the U.S. Army. He said:
I have seen these other sellers resort to all kinds of despicable tactics, such as false positive reviews, hijacking listings, selling counterfeit products, and all these unfair competition. I have never done this before. I do not need. I provide good things at preferential prices, get good reviews from real customers, ship on the same day and have a perfect record, so I never need to do any of these illegal things. But these incentives are wrong. With this way of setting up Amazon, the competition among sellers is getting out of control, especially when the holidays come. I knew that if Amazon had only one reasonable person who would really read my appeal and explanation, they would restore the account. I'm sure. I have nothing to hide. But I can't get anyone's attention. I was completely ignored. I have been reading these horror stories of others, and sometimes they will disappoint me, but I try to stay positive. Maybe I am stupid, but I still believe that all the time and money I spend on building a solid business and then handling these appeals cannot be wasted. I have read a case about where someone’s account was restored after four years and eight months. I don't think I can wait that long. But maybe at some point, people who really care about Amazon will do the right thing.
Calling Fenko's absurd predicament "Kafkaesque" would greatly underestimate this apparently random and inhumane horror of the 21st century-seller blogs and forums essentially echo countless variations on the same depressing theme . In Kafka’s era, people could at least communicate with specific people and hold some fleeting hopes, just as Fink met a bureaucrat with a brain and soul at least at some point, or, if it failed, At least know who to contact to blame yourself for the trouble.
However, in the Amazon era, the curtain can no longer be lifted; in an era when instant messaging is cheaper and easier than ever, Amazon ironically cut off all its sellers' access to useful real-time interactions. Even if the curtain behind the brief, mysterious, often meaningless, and unresponsive emails that Amazon sent to its sellers in the past few weeks is lifted, it’s not clear whether we will find any real humans behind the scenes, whether they are those. Humans will be the incomprehensible pictures of literacy that some of their emails evoke, or just Amazon overworked, sleep deprived warehouse wage workers, foreign help desk sweatshop workers, these tasks have been outsourced or people accepted from robots Guidance...or is Amazon’s rude, indifferent, and cookie-cutter rebuttal exactly what they seem to be: the robot’s work goes all the way down. Either way, no one can talk, and no one can blame names or faces.
So Fenko continued to sit at home with no business to do, waiting, insomnia, losing hope more and more, losing more and more income, wondering if the bureaucrats of the former Soviet Union made it impossible for them to succeed on the road of honesty. Business—all their daily corruption and selective enforcement of their Byzantine rules—is really worse than this. Not knowing how to continue, he became philosophical:
Back there, we kept hearing about the American Dream. Don't get me wrong: the United States has given me and my children a lot, but unlimited possibilities. But this place, Amazon, is like a huge country with its own rules. This is a jungle full of twists and turns and entangled bureaucracies, and many of us are forced to treat each other like savages in order to survive. This is the law of the jungle here. The fact that I happen to be in the United States is not important to these people. I can be anywhere in the world. I am on their turf. This is not the American dream; it is the Amazon dream now, but this is not a dream; it is a nightmare, we are all trapped in it, lost our way. We are lost in Amazon.
The biggest threats to our core freedoms-freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom to make our own medical decisions, freedom to contract, and freedom to run our business as we see fit-used to come from the government. This is no longer the case today. The provisions of our constitution and its bill of rights designed to protect us from excessive government intervention are no longer sufficient to protect us. In many key aspects, they are relics of an era in which the large enterprises that now dominate our society and business life do not exist. Just as in the social field, Twitter and Facebook have the power to de-platform celebrities, well-known publications and even the president of the United States, and deprive them of a large part of their political influence with the click of a button, so Amazon has pulled the string business field. Robots and technocrats behind the scenes like Twitter, Facebook, and Google are now our self-styled public arbiters, deciding what is true and false, what is political speech or out-of-bounds hate speech, and even what is visible and what is almost nothing It can be seen that Amazon’s robots and staff rule the business habitat, deciding what can be bought and sold, what goods are genuine or fake, what prices can be charged, who can buy and sell and who can no longer, and the terms of such transactions What will be, down to the smallest details.
In April of this year, Amazon took an important step, completely cutting off the most basic connection between sellers and their customers, and cutting off the connection between the names and addresses of sellers and these customers. The message is straightforward: Those customers are not yours; they are ours. A business without a client is not a real business; it is a one-off actor in global production, and there are plenty of stand-ins eager to take over this role. Not surprisingly, most of the alternatives for our local small businesses are in China: 49% of Amazon's top sellers are now Chinese, while only 47% are American. As in the case of many of our multinational companies, an important part of Amazon's business model, whether intentionally or unintentionally, needs to make Americans unemployed.
When our slow-moving and chronically deadlocked political class is hesitating whether and how to supervise the huge private entities that now dominate our public sphere, these same entities, operating without any similar hesitation or guilt, are enthusiastically supervising us, infiltrating And re-enhancing more and more aspects of our lives, and, as far as Amazon is concerned, has transformed the booming economy that was once built with the support of countless dynamic and creative small businesses into an undifferentiated, dysfunctional Sellers who are almost helpless, are motivated to push, push, beg and plead, hoping to gain a little bit in the field now occupied by a single growing monopolist. In his own case, Fenko said, “I’m just worried that when anyone out there wakes up and tries to solve this problem, there’s nothing left to solve.”
Alexander Zubatov is a practicing lawyer specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer, specializing in general non-commercial poetry, novels, essays, and controversy. These works have been published in various publications. He lives in New York, in the belly of the beast of New York. He can be found on Twitter @Zoobahtov.
This article was supported by the Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation. The content of this publication is solely the responsibility of the author.
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